Proper power protection means manufacturers, data centres, and complex facilities alike can prevent equipment failure and minimise maintenance to ensure operational continuity.
For many businesses, nothing illustrates the importance of a high-quality power supply like suddenly being without one.
Sam Mangion, a product manager at electrical distribution and service provider IPD, has seen how disruptive and expensive – and even life threatening – a power outage can be.
“Power quality can introduce a lot of operational problems, like disruptions to power and power failures,” he said.
“You might have circuit breakers switching off, which will shut down and disrupt the production. In certain businesses, that can cause a lot of problems, especially in manufacturing where disruption to production can cause a lot of wastage.
“But for places like data centres and hospitals, power is critical. In a hospital, it’s a medical concern and it’s life threatening. Their equipment must operate on a clean supply; a power quality problem, for instance, could cause misreading of diagnoses for cancer patients or in an MRI.”
Even for data centres or mining operations, where money is more likely to be on the line than lives, power supply is a critical concern.
“They have a very big cost of operation by the minute, by the hour; any sort of disruption in that space has a high commercial impact,” Mangion said.
“Or consider a manufacturing site: if you’ve got dye in injection molds, for instance, the problem is not the fact that you stop the machine for now. If you stop the machine with all the product cooling down inside, you’ve got a big cleanup process: an outage that can take a long time to recover from.”
Minimising maintenance and extending equipment life
The lesson for any business that depends on a regular power supply for its operations is clear: power quality and surge protection ensure the stable and reliable energy access that keeps equipment operating.
In the case of one mine in South Australia, said IPD Senior Product Manager Ian Richardson, a lightning strike proved powerful enough to shut down the entire operation – at a cost of millions of dollars per hour of downtime.
And downtime and operational expenses aren’t the only concern, he said. Businesses should also be thinking about the impact that problems such as power surges can have on their equipment.
“If we get power surges coming through the line, it can cause physical damage to certain components,” he said.
“One of the fundamentals of power quality is that it has to ensure a continuity of service, and when we get supply interruptions, we get poor quality of supply, which can result in equipment failures.”
While lightning represents power surges at their most visible and dramatic, Richardson said 85 per cent of surges come from within an operation’s own facilities.
“Big buildings experience large compressor loads, such as chillers and air conditioning systems,” he explained.
“Every time they start and stop, there will be a spike on the line, and it really depends on the degree of that spike as to what consequential damage you’re going to get.
“But there’s also a long-term issue: quite often you don’t get a problem immediately, but those low-level surges, which we see on networks all the time, chip away at the insulation of equipment, particularly electronics. Then it deteriorates and degrades over a period of time, until finally you get an equipment failure.”
Ensuring power quality
According to both Mangion and Richardson, solutions are available to mitigate surge risks and improve power performance. IPD can help analyse a business’s problems, then advise potential solutions.
“If your machinery is generating a lot of power spikes on the line and affecting a PLC (programmable logic controller) on another machine, the solution can be as simple as putting a small surge protector on that machine to suppress these spikes,” Richardson said.
“Ideally, you should try to stop the cause at its source, but sometimes that’s a bit difficult: if you’ve got a big motor that’s starting and stopping all the time, we can reduce the effect by putting a soft starter or variable speed drive on it.”
According to Mangion, problems with power quality should not necessarily be understood as the result of something going wrong.
“All loads leave a fingerprint in the way that they switch power or cause a harmonic effect, so you will always have a degree of harmonics on the site,” he said.
“What matters is managing the power quality and protecting equipment that needs a clean supply through power quality mitigation techniques such as a UPS, or uninterruptible power supply.
“But the other side involves isolating and segregating pieces of equipment that either cause a lot of power quality issues or are more susceptible to power quality problems.”
That solution could be applied to an arc furnace, for instance, or when an operation draws on a large amount of direct current. Alternatively, in the case of sensitive equipment such as electronics or computer equipment, a UPS or transformer might be appropriate.
“There are ways of managing power quality,” Mangion said. “Understand what you’ve got on your side and manage around that.”
Ultimately, power quality and surge protection is a question of return on investment: determining the cost an outage imposes on a business.
“We’re not talking about maintained outages; we’re talking about an unplanned outage, because those are the ones that are really costly,” Mangion said.
“If you blow a transformer and it takes four months for a replacement to come in for your plant, can you afford a four-month transformer outage? Can you avoid a fire on your site?
“Those are the costings you should consider.”
For more information on power quality and surge protection solutions, visit the IPD website.
